If you are suffering from Trump-induced anxiety, then you should not read my next two posts because they may interfere with your sleep. Not that I am out to scare people. In fact, I'll begin by putting your mind somewhat at ease: Trump's term will probably not be nearly as scary as he made it sound during his campaign. Within just a few weeks of his victory he backpedaled on his promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, build a 2,000-mile long wall, deport eleven million people, and put Hillary Clinton behind bars. Whether you interpret Trump’s post-election reversals as a magnanimous display of ideological flexibility or proof that he is an opportunistic and dishonest demagogue probably depends on your political persuasion; either way, the Apocalypse is not coming on January 20, 2017.
Your real cause for concern should be what will happen in 2020 when Trump is up for reelection.
Trump opponents were never able to convince Americans that Trump was a threat to liberal democracy, perhaps because the possibility of a Trump presidency was too remote to be menacing. Perhaps more importantly, Americans have lived in a liberal democratic political system (that is a democracy that protects individual rights and freedoms) so long that they cannot imagine any scenario in which it would cease to exist. They assume that checks, balances, and elections will always prevent the country from slipping toward authoritarianism.
The 2020 election will be the ultimate test of those assumptions.
The 2016 election was hair-raising, but in an entertaining way. Trump's authoritarian-strong-man campaign message was so out of place in the ring of American politics that he looked like an oafish, amateur boxer throwing wild, off-balanced punches at a succession of poised and well-trained professionals. The campaign was like a good horror movie: real enough to make you consider how you would survive a zombie outbreak but not so real that you started stockpiling food and ammunition in your basement. Trump was the caricature of a dictator in a World War II-era comic strip—a furious imp taking swings at a much larger political apparatus that yawningly held him at bay with a single outstretched arm.
But then he won. And when the next election comes around, he will be the larger political apparatus.
This two-part post will draw insights into the 2016 presidential race by comparing it to the rise of Hungary's so-called "illiberal democracy." Part II will look forward to the 2020 presidential election and consider why America should be much more concerned about President Trump in the next campaign than it was about the billionaire candidate of 2016.
If there is one country that can tell America what it will be like to have Donald Trump as president, it is Hungary. In 2010, Hungary elected a president who very well may become Donald Trump's bosom buddy. The similarities between the two are uncanny. Like Trump, Orban disdains mainstream media, and "liberal elites." He became famous for taking a hard line on immigration. While other European countries were allowing Syrian refugees to cross into the European Union, he erected one hundred miles of razor-wire fencing to keep them out, dismissing pressure from Germany to be more welcoming as "moral imperialism." Orban is fiercely nationalistic and never shies away from accusing his opponents of serving foreign interests. His personality is brash and unapologetic.
After winning the 2010 Hungarian elections, Orban and his Fidesz party used ingenuous methods to strengthen its influence. It managed to send ten percent of the country's judges packing with one fell swoop by lowering the mandatory retirement age, then filled the vacancies with party-friendly jurists.
Orban's regime has also found controversial but mostly legal ways to control the media. It subjected the country's press to a hail-storm of regulations, including one that forbade newscasters from including "opinions" within their reports. (One station was sanctioned for describing a political party as "far right.") It loosened defamation laws. Journalists had to begin disclosing their sources. A law required television and radio stations that broadcast campaign advertisements to give all national parties equal airtime--and to do it free of charge. Ostensibly, the measure was meant to guarantee that voters got a fair look at each political parties. In practice, it had the effect of snuffing out campaign ads; broadcasters understandably were not eager to give away their advertising time. Perhaps the government's most striking blow to media pluralism was its informal policy of using only pro-government media outlets for its advertisements. Because the Hungarian government accounts for a huge share of the media's advertising revenue, the result has been that pro-Orban news sources now dominate the market while dissenting competitors are struggling.
The chilling impact that these measures have had on free speech and media pluralism led one watchdog organization to lament that the 2014 Hungarian elections were free, but not fair. The 2014 election was an absolute rout. Orban stayed in power and his party won 67% of the parliamentary seats thanks, in part, to meticulous gerrymandering (Orban's party took a mere 45% of the popular vote).
Orban began his political career as a fiery anti-communist democrat and progressive. But after the 2014 electoral rout, he openly and unapologetically called for a move away from liberal democracy. Soon after his party routed the opposition in Hungary's 2014 elections, he gave a speech that could have been titled "Make Hungary Great Again." Orban described his country as being in "a race to invent a state that is most capable of making a nation successful." The best models, he argued, were Signapore, China, India, Turkey, and Russia, not western democracies. Free democracy, he reasoned, was an impediment to, not a necessary element of, the ideal state. "A trending topic in thinking," he proclaimed, "is understanding systems that are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe not even democracies, and yet [are] making nations successful. . . . [W]e have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society, as well as the liberal way to look at the world." To Orban, Liberalism's uncompromising commitment to personal freedoms had been getting in the way of the Hungarian government's ability to serve the "national interest"--that is, protecting its citizens from foreign exploitation and a descent into welfare-state status. The race to the perfect form of government would not be won by a liberal state, but by what he termed an "illiberal state" that was willing to put national success ahead of individual freedoms.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump exhibited an eerie proclivity for Orban-style authoritarianism. Constitutional obstacles never seemed to get in the way of his plans to make America great again. Never shy of hypocrisy, the main proponent of the "birther movement" advocated loosening libel laws so that he would have an easier time suing journalists that spoke against him. (But don't worry, Trump assured, nobody believes in freedom of the press more than him.) He called for a ban on Muslims entering the country. (But don't worry, it will only last as long as it takes for our leaders to "figure out what the hell is going on.") Despite his persona as the pro-Second Amendment option, he supported a law that would unconstitutionally prevent citizens from purchasing guns if they were on a "no fly list"--a list that the government creates without the least semblance of due process. As if to confirm his preference for mandated nationalism over the First Amendment, he recently proposed that anyone who burns the American flag should lose their citizenship.
Perhaps the most startling moment of his campaign--and that is really saying something--came when Trump showcased the psychological talent that so many authoritarians possess: the ability to justify the unholiest means to reach his ends. On a morning talk show, Joe Scarborough asked Trump to defend his praise for Vladimir Putin in light of allegations that the Russian President had ordered the killing of high-profile dissenting journalists. Even the most Putin-sympathetic politician would have simply skirted the question by doubting the veracity of the allegations. Trump, however, talked about the extra-legal killings as if they are part-and-parcel of sound, strong leadership: "He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, you know unlike what we have in this country." Scarborough pressed the point. "Well," Trump went on, "I think our country does a lot of killing." Eventually Trump recognized from Scarborough's dumb-struck response that he needed to backtrack, but not before the window to his authoritarian personality had been opened.
Whereas conservative politicians generally preach a return to constitutional religion as the remedy for America's inadequacies, Trump ran a campaign that advertised his own over-sized personality as America's only hope. Trump devotees did little to dispel his authoritarian image. They became something like a personality cult, supporting Trump not for the strength of his ideas--which were always too illusory to believe in anyway--but for the perceived strength of his personality. One pollster found that a person's authoritarian inclinations was a better determinant of their likelihood to support Trump than income, gender, age, race, or religion. In what may have been a Freudian slip, Maine's governor made news when he said America needed an "authoritarian" leader like Trump to prevent the country from slipping into anarchy (he apparently meant to say "authoritative").
And now Viktor Orban is on his way to Washington. Donald Trump extended the invitation himself, telling Orban in a phone conversation that he thinks highly of Hungary. The two shared a laugh about how both politicians had been treated as "black sheep."
For Americans who remain committed to the ideal of a liberal democracy, the camaraderie between Trump and Orban is troubling. Their meeting will probably begin with a discussion of walls, razor-wire fences, and other ways to keep those pesky immigrants from waltzing over their borders. Orban will have suggestions for how American can deal with its own immigration problem. But then the two "black sheep" will probably commiserate over their unfair treatment at the hands of what they each perceive as slanted, liberal journalists. Orban will surely have some suggestions for how Trump can deal with them, too.
Orban has something that Trump needs: a way to rationalize the authoritarian and illiberal ideas that the two men have in common. During the 2016 election, Trump flailed like he was wearing ice skates for the very first time as he tried incorporate his off-the-cuff tweets into a consistent ideology. By the end of the campaign "Trumpism" was still a brainstorm pieced together from semi-coherent tirades against the biased media, his fear of foreign influence, and his opinion that American had become impotent thanks to the incompetence and corruption of the political establishment.
Even Trump's tight circle of apologists couldn't keep up. Every Sunday morning they squirmed in their chairs, trying to spin last week's controversy-makers into something the American public could digest. Their problem was that they were serving illiberal meat to a country that has been on a strict diet of liberal democracy.
In Viktor Orban, Trump will meet a man who has already crafted xenophobic, authoritarian, an nationalistic attitudes into a more coherent ideology. It is an ideology that equates political restraint to weakness. In Trump, Orban may find a receptive pupil for a lesson on the virtues of the illiberal state.
Viktor Orban must have watched the presidential election with glee. In his 2014 speech, he predicted that the west would soon realize the error of its democratic liberal ways and follow Hungary's lead to an illiberal system. Trump's election may have been the ultimate vindication.
________________________________________________________________________
For another perspective:
A pair of political scientist's dispute the correlation between authoritarian inclinations and a person's tendency to support Donald Trump. They concluded that populist tendencies tend to play a bigger role. You can find an article summarizing their findings at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/03/09/trumps-voters-arent-authoritarians-new-research-says-so-what-are-they/?utm_term=.64f4065c2b4a.
Further Reading:
Politico published a well-written biopic of Viktor Orban, available at http://www.politico.eu/list/politico-28/viktor-orban/, but I highly recommend that you take the time to read the 2014 speech that I referenced, available at http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/full-text-of-viktor-orbans-speech-at-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo-of-26-july-2014/10592.
For an article drawing parallels between Trump and Benito Mussolini, read http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/american-authoritarianism-under-donald-trump/495263/.
I found that it was not easy to find good online sources for researching Hungarian politics. Much of my information came from the extensive report of a watch dog organization, which can be found at https://www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/hungary_democracy_under_threat.pdf.
For a somewhat scholarly take on the rise of authoritarianism, you can read “Europe’s Other Democratic Deficit: National Authoritarianism in a Democratic Union.” http://fas-polisci.rutgers.edu/dkelemen/research/Kelemendemocraticdeficit.pdf.
What seemed like a reliable blog had some interesting stories about how Orban's political opponents are being subjected to humiliating news reports (http://hungarianfreepress.com/2016/01/27/akos-gergely-balogh-of-mothers-and-daughters-and-the-villainy-of-anonymity/; and http://hungarianfreepress.com/2016/11/11/hungarian-far-right-leader-gabor-vona-accused-of-homosexual-orgies/) but I was not able to verify the information to my satisfaction. If anyone can, please let me know.
But then he won. And when the next election comes around, he will be the larger political apparatus.
This two-part post will draw insights into the 2016 presidential race by comparing it to the rise of Hungary's so-called "illiberal democracy." Part II will look forward to the 2020 presidential election and consider why America should be much more concerned about President Trump in the next campaign than it was about the billionaire candidate of 2016.
Part I: Donald Trump and the Rise of Illiberal Democracy
If there is one country that can tell America what it will be like to have Donald Trump as president, it is Hungary. In 2010, Hungary elected a president who very well may become Donald Trump's bosom buddy. The similarities between the two are uncanny. Like Trump, Orban disdains mainstream media, and "liberal elites." He became famous for taking a hard line on immigration. While other European countries were allowing Syrian refugees to cross into the European Union, he erected one hundred miles of razor-wire fencing to keep them out, dismissing pressure from Germany to be more welcoming as "moral imperialism." Orban is fiercely nationalistic and never shies away from accusing his opponents of serving foreign interests. His personality is brash and unapologetic.
After winning the 2010 Hungarian elections, Orban and his Fidesz party used ingenuous methods to strengthen its influence. It managed to send ten percent of the country's judges packing with one fell swoop by lowering the mandatory retirement age, then filled the vacancies with party-friendly jurists.
Orban's regime has also found controversial but mostly legal ways to control the media. It subjected the country's press to a hail-storm of regulations, including one that forbade newscasters from including "opinions" within their reports. (One station was sanctioned for describing a political party as "far right.") It loosened defamation laws. Journalists had to begin disclosing their sources. A law required television and radio stations that broadcast campaign advertisements to give all national parties equal airtime--and to do it free of charge. Ostensibly, the measure was meant to guarantee that voters got a fair look at each political parties. In practice, it had the effect of snuffing out campaign ads; broadcasters understandably were not eager to give away their advertising time. Perhaps the government's most striking blow to media pluralism was its informal policy of using only pro-government media outlets for its advertisements. Because the Hungarian government accounts for a huge share of the media's advertising revenue, the result has been that pro-Orban news sources now dominate the market while dissenting competitors are struggling.
The chilling impact that these measures have had on free speech and media pluralism led one watchdog organization to lament that the 2014 Hungarian elections were free, but not fair. The 2014 election was an absolute rout. Orban stayed in power and his party won 67% of the parliamentary seats thanks, in part, to meticulous gerrymandering (Orban's party took a mere 45% of the popular vote).
Orban began his political career as a fiery anti-communist democrat and progressive. But after the 2014 electoral rout, he openly and unapologetically called for a move away from liberal democracy. Soon after his party routed the opposition in Hungary's 2014 elections, he gave a speech that could have been titled "Make Hungary Great Again." Orban described his country as being in "a race to invent a state that is most capable of making a nation successful." The best models, he argued, were Signapore, China, India, Turkey, and Russia, not western democracies. Free democracy, he reasoned, was an impediment to, not a necessary element of, the ideal state. "A trending topic in thinking," he proclaimed, "is understanding systems that are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe not even democracies, and yet [are] making nations successful. . . . [W]e have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society, as well as the liberal way to look at the world." To Orban, Liberalism's uncompromising commitment to personal freedoms had been getting in the way of the Hungarian government's ability to serve the "national interest"--that is, protecting its citizens from foreign exploitation and a descent into welfare-state status. The race to the perfect form of government would not be won by a liberal state, but by what he termed an "illiberal state" that was willing to put national success ahead of individual freedoms.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump exhibited an eerie proclivity for Orban-style authoritarianism. Constitutional obstacles never seemed to get in the way of his plans to make America great again. Never shy of hypocrisy, the main proponent of the "birther movement" advocated loosening libel laws so that he would have an easier time suing journalists that spoke against him. (But don't worry, Trump assured, nobody believes in freedom of the press more than him.) He called for a ban on Muslims entering the country. (But don't worry, it will only last as long as it takes for our leaders to "figure out what the hell is going on.") Despite his persona as the pro-Second Amendment option, he supported a law that would unconstitutionally prevent citizens from purchasing guns if they were on a "no fly list"--a list that the government creates without the least semblance of due process. As if to confirm his preference for mandated nationalism over the First Amendment, he recently proposed that anyone who burns the American flag should lose their citizenship.
Perhaps the most startling moment of his campaign--and that is really saying something--came when Trump showcased the psychological talent that so many authoritarians possess: the ability to justify the unholiest means to reach his ends. On a morning talk show, Joe Scarborough asked Trump to defend his praise for Vladimir Putin in light of allegations that the Russian President had ordered the killing of high-profile dissenting journalists. Even the most Putin-sympathetic politician would have simply skirted the question by doubting the veracity of the allegations. Trump, however, talked about the extra-legal killings as if they are part-and-parcel of sound, strong leadership: "He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, you know unlike what we have in this country." Scarborough pressed the point. "Well," Trump went on, "I think our country does a lot of killing." Eventually Trump recognized from Scarborough's dumb-struck response that he needed to backtrack, but not before the window to his authoritarian personality had been opened.
Whereas conservative politicians generally preach a return to constitutional religion as the remedy for America's inadequacies, Trump ran a campaign that advertised his own over-sized personality as America's only hope. Trump devotees did little to dispel his authoritarian image. They became something like a personality cult, supporting Trump not for the strength of his ideas--which were always too illusory to believe in anyway--but for the perceived strength of his personality. One pollster found that a person's authoritarian inclinations was a better determinant of their likelihood to support Trump than income, gender, age, race, or religion. In what may have been a Freudian slip, Maine's governor made news when he said America needed an "authoritarian" leader like Trump to prevent the country from slipping into anarchy (he apparently meant to say "authoritative").
And now Viktor Orban is on his way to Washington. Donald Trump extended the invitation himself, telling Orban in a phone conversation that he thinks highly of Hungary. The two shared a laugh about how both politicians had been treated as "black sheep."
For Americans who remain committed to the ideal of a liberal democracy, the camaraderie between Trump and Orban is troubling. Their meeting will probably begin with a discussion of walls, razor-wire fences, and other ways to keep those pesky immigrants from waltzing over their borders. Orban will have suggestions for how American can deal with its own immigration problem. But then the two "black sheep" will probably commiserate over their unfair treatment at the hands of what they each perceive as slanted, liberal journalists. Orban will surely have some suggestions for how Trump can deal with them, too.
Orban has something that Trump needs: a way to rationalize the authoritarian and illiberal ideas that the two men have in common. During the 2016 election, Trump flailed like he was wearing ice skates for the very first time as he tried incorporate his off-the-cuff tweets into a consistent ideology. By the end of the campaign "Trumpism" was still a brainstorm pieced together from semi-coherent tirades against the biased media, his fear of foreign influence, and his opinion that American had become impotent thanks to the incompetence and corruption of the political establishment.
Even Trump's tight circle of apologists couldn't keep up. Every Sunday morning they squirmed in their chairs, trying to spin last week's controversy-makers into something the American public could digest. Their problem was that they were serving illiberal meat to a country that has been on a strict diet of liberal democracy.
In Viktor Orban, Trump will meet a man who has already crafted xenophobic, authoritarian, an nationalistic attitudes into a more coherent ideology. It is an ideology that equates political restraint to weakness. In Trump, Orban may find a receptive pupil for a lesson on the virtues of the illiberal state.
Viktor Orban must have watched the presidential election with glee. In his 2014 speech, he predicted that the west would soon realize the error of its democratic liberal ways and follow Hungary's lead to an illiberal system. Trump's election may have been the ultimate vindication.
________________________________________________________________________
For another perspective:
A pair of political scientist's dispute the correlation between authoritarian inclinations and a person's tendency to support Donald Trump. They concluded that populist tendencies tend to play a bigger role. You can find an article summarizing their findings at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/03/09/trumps-voters-arent-authoritarians-new-research-says-so-what-are-they/?utm_term=.64f4065c2b4a.
Further Reading:
Politico published a well-written biopic of Viktor Orban, available at http://www.politico.eu/list/politico-28/viktor-orban/, but I highly recommend that you take the time to read the 2014 speech that I referenced, available at http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/full-text-of-viktor-orbans-speech-at-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo-of-26-july-2014/10592.
For an article drawing parallels between Trump and Benito Mussolini, read http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/american-authoritarianism-under-donald-trump/495263/.
I found that it was not easy to find good online sources for researching Hungarian politics. Much of my information came from the extensive report of a watch dog organization, which can be found at https://www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/hungary_democracy_under_threat.pdf.
For a somewhat scholarly take on the rise of authoritarianism, you can read “Europe’s Other Democratic Deficit: National Authoritarianism in a Democratic Union.” http://fas-polisci.rutgers.edu/dkelemen/research/Kelemendemocraticdeficit.pdf.
What seemed like a reliable blog had some interesting stories about how Orban's political opponents are being subjected to humiliating news reports (http://hungarianfreepress.com/2016/01/27/akos-gergely-balogh-of-mothers-and-daughters-and-the-villainy-of-anonymity/; and http://hungarianfreepress.com/2016/11/11/hungarian-far-right-leader-gabor-vona-accused-of-homosexual-orgies/) but I was not able to verify the information to my satisfaction. If anyone can, please let me know.
Again, I see you have done a lot of research that I can not rebuff. However, I think you give Mr Trump too much credit. I don't believe even he thought he would win the election, so to conclude he has an evil plan to thwart our freedoms in the USA is a stretch. His campaign promises were baloney, fake. He is a game player and said whatever it took to win. But all winners make mistakes, no one wins all the time. I have to trust that our system IS better than one mans personal agenda.
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